Dying for Attention

Patricia Cornwell’s ‘Dust,’ and More

Patricia Cornwell’s imperious forensic scientist, Kay Scarpetta, shows uncharacteristic signs of vulnerability at the beginning of DUST (Putnam, $28.95), after she returns from a traumatic trip to Newtown, Conn., to help with autopsies of victims of the mass murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The experience has left her in an “amnesiac” state of mind. “I can’t recall or share what at last I could explain to devastated people after I’ve taken care of their dead.”

So the big-brain scientist is in a more meditative mood than usual when she tackles the job waiting for her at the Cambridge Forensic Center, her state-of-the-art facilities as the chief medical examiner of Massachusetts. An M.I.T. graduate student has been found killed and ritualistically posed on the campus athletic fields. When the autopsy turns up a startling piece of evidence on the body — fluorescent particles of colored powder in “electric” shades of deep red, emerald green and dark bluish purple that look like “fairy dust” — Scarpetta suspects the murder may be related to three homicides committed by the so-called Capital Murderer in Washington, D.C.

Like the Newtown carnage, these gaudy homicides look like “spectacle killings” to Scarpetta’s husband, Benton Wesley, an F.B.I. criminal profiler who is working the cases. His analysis of the “dramatic public display” that began with the Columbine massacre indicates that “people have become addicted to attention, to fame. Profoundly disturbed individuals will kill and die for it.” That’s an unsettling thought for Scarpetta, who prefers cold, clinical forensic science to real-life insanity. There’s plenty going on at Scarpetta’s bustling lab, which has acquired a multitouch table and other cool gadgets for its “Progressive Immersion Theater.” And as busy as she is, Scarpetta somehow manages to bring together all the important people in her life for an old-­fashioned Christmas.

Photo

Credit
Christoph Niemann

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With the exception of Tim Dorsey’s maniacal drives on Florida blacktop, we haven’t gone on a good road trip since James Crumley left us. So buckle up for a rowdy ride with Rick Gavin in NOWHERE NICE (Minotaur, $24.99), the latest in a riotous series set in the Mississippi Delta and featuring the misadventures of the repo man Nick Reid and his hulking sidekick, Desmond. When Guy Baptiste Boudrot, a local meth lord “with a vile sadistic streak,” breaks out of the Mississippi State Penitentiary vowing vengeance on the upstanding citizens who put him away, Nick and Desmond, who head the list, set out to raise the alarm.

Those endangered swamp rats, rustics and assorted lowlifes who receive the warnings happily go along for a ride across the state that leads to periodic gunfights, roadhouse brawls and intense conversations on the merits of various tractors (“Harrows and seeders they’d had good use from. Harrows and seeders they hadn’t”) and the best way to cook catfish (“all variations on ‘fried’ ”). Calling these characters colorful doesn’t begin to get at the rich regional nuances that Gavin mines at every pit stop from Arkansas to Alabama, or the appeal of a hero like Nick, who goes into culture shock when he discovers that Delta folks’ “reputation for being hardscrabble and damned” has spread throughout the South.

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A sensitive hero is a good thing to have in a tough crime novel — up to a point. That point is passed in R. J. Ellory’s CITY OF LIES (Overlook, $26.95) when the doting author allows these tender feelings to soften his protagonist’s brain. John Harper, a two-bit journalist who lives in Miami and writes “squibs” for local newspapers, reluctantly heads back home to New York when he learns that the father he’d been told was long dead is actually alive and lying in a coma from a gunshot wound. While Harper is on death watch, a business associate of his father’s takes him in hand, putting him up in a trendy hotel, treating him to a classy wardrobe, picking up all his expenses and leaving him in the care of a gorgeous dame. Choosing to be “selectively dumb” about the intentions of his benefactor, Harper is shocked to learn that his father is a criminal kingpin whose mob is grooming Harper to take over the business. Ellory is a punchy stylist who writes natural dialogue for interesting characters like the cop who has “a face like a suitcase that has traveled the world.” He should lose Harper and write a book for that guy.

Reading a novel by Maurizio de Giovanni is like stepping into a Vittorio De Sica movie. The sights and smells of Naples are pungently evoked in EVERYONE IN THEIR PLACE (Europa, paper, $17), the latest entry in a superb historical series set in Fascist Italy during the 1930s and featuring one of the most melancholy detectives in European noir crime fiction. Commissario Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi is burdened by a terrible gift: He can see the revenants of murder victims and hear their last thoughts. The haunted commissario conducts an investigation into the murder of a duchess who was quite the woman of affairs. The boudoir may hold the answer to the crime, but we’re more captivated by the streets outside the palaz­zo, where families gather on a sweltering Sunday night to pump some lifeblood into this “crazy, laughing city.”

A version of this review appears in print on December 15, 2013, on Page BR27 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Dying for Attention. Today's Paper|Subscribe